There has never been any question about the Crawleys’ prosperity. The features encompass the family—who we welcomed on display this evening in Downton Abbey‘s third-season premiere—and, at times, endanger to eat them.

The Crawleys assistance a small navy of servants, as well as a town. Meals are experienced in white-colored tie and tail-coats. Marriages believe fairy tale-like ratios.

The centerpiece: Downton Abbey, the our ancestors property, a wonderful house in Southeast Britain stuffed with everything you would expect—17th millennium Nederlander masterpeices dangle in the orange-hued cigarette smoking room. Down the area, flower walls sections enhance the collection, delivered to Downton from The country by the third earl.

Just the kind of place in which you can truly rest on the few days.

Now, though, all this prosperity is in question. The Crawleys have confirmed to be pound-foolish once again. As the new period starts, John Crawley, the present Earl of Grantham and close relatives patriarch, has obviously dedicated several primary making an financial commitment errors. First, he placed too great a sum in only one inventory, a Canada railway organization. The organization went broke, missing its us president and will soon be consumed by the govt. Result: a finish loss of major.

“Investing in one business, was not that foolish?” his spouse, Cora, requests him. Indeed. Diversifaction is key to any sensible assigned technique.

Lord Grantham had depended too much on other individuals' predictions. He, actually, breached a key concept that Ben Graham would espouse a several years later in The Brilliant Investor: any financial commitment must be designed on essential analysis that you perform yourself. Moreover, the earl erred by trying to capture a large macroeconomic headwind—that a post-war growth would increase the railroads—instead of analyzing whether the particular organization could take benefits of such a tailwind. (Today, that would be similar to making an financial commitment in contractors, such as Cost Bros or K.B. Houses, instead of selecting something more secure and less cyclical, like a Coca-Cola or a Wal-Mart.)

These making an financial commitment errors, of course, were not the first time that the Crawleys have turned out to be children members owned and operated of significant prosperity, but little financial knowledge. Master Grantham’s dad designed a serious property preparing error. The dead pater familias designed an include that permitted close relatives members bequest to complete only to a men heir. It was almost unbreakable; to do so would have needed a invoice from Parliament. Unfortunately, the earl had no grandsons, significance the lot of money would go to a finish unfamiliar person. More intense still, most of that bequest came not from the Crawleys, but Robert’s spouse, an United states heiress.

Certainly, amassing a fortune—$1.1 billion by our estimates—requires some cunning. So, there’s every possibility that the Crawley coffers can be refilled. Else, they may find themselves missing from next year’s Fictional 15, FORBES’ annual estimates of fiction’s wealthiest characters. Such a slight would probably betray our American sentiment and plainspoken manner, but we have realized that Lord Grantham himself is not above a guest-list snubbing to make a point.

To be sure, eldest daughter Mary, who has now wed that distantly related heir, seems dead set on raising her brood in Downton. She’s proving to be something of a English pastoral Scarlet O’Hara. She’ll now have her work cut out for her—remember what we said about the family’s tony mentality being a curse sometimes?